This invention relates to wooden tiles and a method of making such a wooden tiles.
Wooden tiles have long been utilized as a covering material, particularly for floors. For many years, good quality logs were plentiful and during manufacture the wastage of wood was considerable whilst the tiles were unnecessarily thick. Depletion of lumber reserves has made logs more scarce and consequently expensive. In order to compensate for these problems the thickness of floor tiles in general has been reduced and the thickness of presently manufactured floor tiles is about 6 to 7 mm. A thinner tile has not been available simply because it has been uneconomic to manufacture the tiles by conventional methods.
It has been proposed to make floor tiles thinner than 6 mm by bonding a veneer of 1 to 2 mm thick on to an inexpensive wooden backing such as plywood or chipboard of a thickness of at least 1.5 mm to produce a laminated wooden tile. Whilst this method achieves a slightly reduced cost, the tile quality is substantially decreased and the service life is relatively short. In another attempt to reduce tile thickness, a tile has been manufactured with a top layer consisting of a thin veneer of 1 mm or under which is glued onto a substrate having a clear plastic lining on top of it. However, this method is expensive and the tile so produced does not have the natural warmth which is inherent in a natural wooden tile.
Another prior art method involves sawing a sheet of wood from a piece of lumber. The sheet of wood is then cut into a plurality of individual rectangular shaped blocks to which glue is applied along their edges. The blocks are then butted together side-by-side in any selected pattern and bonded together. The disadvantages of such a method are that it is generally not practical to manufacture the sheet of wood to a thickness of less than 6.2 mm, a considerable amount of wood is wasted in the form of sawdust by the saw cutting operation and a low yield results from the geometric differences in round logs and the straight saw cut line required for obtaining the sheet thickness.
Furthermore, the cutting of the wood with a saw results in a closed grain surface on both the top and bottom major surfaces of the cut sheet resulting in the finished tile having a rigid construction, substantially no flexibility and being brittle.